all that required
proof. In the very first number there appeared what was claimed to be an
extract from that "Life of Byron" which he had given to Moore, and which
had been suppressed, if not bought up. It was entitled "My Wedding
Night," and went into particulars so much in the style of Byron, that I,
for one, have always believed it faithful, and neither an imitation nor
a counterfeit. I have since been assured that Lady Caroline Lamb, and
two or three more at least "of that ilk," had the reading of these
memoirs, and of course portions of the whole might have been copied. But
however that may be, the publication by Dr. Maginn of the chapter
mentioned was either such a piece of heartless treachery or such an
impudent fabrication as no decent person would venture to encourage.
Though other chapters were promised, not another line appeared; the
magazine blew up, the Doctor was _tabooed_, and soon after died a
miserable death.

But enough. That William Blackwood was an extraordinary man is evident
enough from the astonishing success of his Magazine. Whatever may have
been its history, its faults, or its follies, it has maintained itself
now in the public favor of the world itself for nearly fifty years, and
most of the time at a prodigious elevation, in unapproachable solitude.
Burning and acrimonious, unrelenting, and at times deadly in its hatred,
full of desperate partisanship, and of judicial blindness toward all who
belonged to the other side in politics, it was always full of
earnestness and originality and tumultuous life, and often-times not
only generous, but magnanimous and forgiving.

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER.

XI.

THE WOMAN QUESTION: OR, WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH HER?

"What do you think of this Woman's Rights question?" said Bob Stephens.
"From some of your remarks, I apprehend that you think there is
something in it. I may be wrong, but I must confess that I have looked
with disgust on the whole movement. No man reverences women as I do; but
I reverence them _as_ women. I reverence them for those very things in
which their sex differs from ours; but when they come upon our ground,
and begin to work and fight after our manner and with our weapons, I
regard them as fearful anomalies, neither men nor women. These Women's
Rights Conventions appear to me to have ventilated crudities,
absurdities, and blasphemies. To hear them talk about men, one would
suppose that the two sexes were natural born enemies, an